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About John Pitcher

John Pitcher is the chief classical music, jazz and dance critic as well as co-founder of ArtsNash. He has been a classical music critic for the Washington Post, the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, National Public Radio’s Performance Today (NPR), ArtNowNashville.com and the Nashville Scene. His writings about music and the arts have also appeared in Symphony Magazine, American Record Guide and Stagebill Magazine, among other publications. Pitcher earned his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he studied arts writing with Judith Crist and Phyllis Garland. His work has received the New York State Associated Press award for outstanding classical music criticism.

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Random Stories From the Archives

What was the secret of Beethoven’s genius? Leonard Bernstein believed it was the composer’s extraordinary intuition, his uncanny sense of always knowing what note should come next. Beethoven, it seems, wrote with inevitability. As fate would have it, Beethoven’s best-known work is anchoring the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s concert series this weekend at the Schermerhorn Symphony […]

Nashville Ballet is calling its program this weekend “Attitude.” The company might consider renaming it “Altitude,” since the troupe is leaping to new heights with this production. Everything about the program, which opens Friday at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Polk Theater and runs through Sunday, is strong. The choreography is strikingly original and the […]

Nashville Children’s Theatre (NCT), the nation’s oldest professional theater for young audiences, is pleased to announce the addition of Technical Director Alex Useted. Useted brings extensive experience from Chicago’s theaters to Nashville. “Alex absolutely has the chops, and is going to be a great fit,” says NCT Artistic Director Scot Copeland. “We’ve been fortunate to […]

Parade is a tragic tale, with no upbeat situations or happy ending that allows us to leave the disquieting world behind. And yet as written by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown – and powerfully staged by Boiler Room Theatre – it offers love and compassion amid hate and cruelty. Director Sondra Morton has made […]

Nashville Ballet’s annual Attitude program is always among the most strikingly original and entertaining shows of the year (here’s what ArtsNash thought of last year’s performance). This month, Nashville Ballet is offering a discount on Attitude tickets. Performances are Feb. 14 to 16 at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Polk Theatre. The company has provided […]

Thank heavens for good actors and musicians. Without them slogging through Ben Elton’s confused book for We Will Rock You would be as enjoyable as a root canal. How I wanted to feel otherwise as I entered Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Jackson Hall Tuesday for the Nashville opening of the show’s North American tour. After all, […]

German Expressionism was like a nova. It appeared in a flash in 1905 after artists in Dresden and Munich began emulating their Post-Impressionist and Fauvist counterparts in France, and it burned brightly for about a decade. The movement dimmed considerably after World War I, but like cosmic background radiation, its influences are still detectable. Some […]

John Seigenthaler has a legacy (including his unwavering support for the arts) that stretches through Nashville and well beyond. That legacy includes his work as Special Assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with the Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s; his career as a reporter, then Editor and Publisher and later Chairman Emeritus […]

Nashville Opera announced Thursday that it received a $5,000 grant from Wells Fargo for its Nashville Opera On Tour education outreach program. The company produces a traveling opera performance which is seen by more than 25,000 students across 17 counties in Middle Tennessee each year. This season, Nashville Opera On Tour will perform Little Red’s […]

Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall, hailed by critics and others as one of the smartest, wittiest dramas in recent history, makes its Nashville premiere Friday (March 20) through April 6. It is part of Actors Bridge Ensemble’s inaugural season in its intimate new studio space on Charlotte Avenue. The play is one of the presentations in […]

How do you fill a concert hall for a program of dauntingly difficult 20th-century music? You could pay people to come. Better still, you could enlist the help of a beloved figure of American pop culture. Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra wisely chose the latter course on Thursday night, when they joined actor […]

The Blair String Quartet spent its Friday evening climbing musical mountains. For its spring concert at Ingram Hall, the ensemble played only masterpieces. The final quartets of Beethoven and Brahms were both on the program. So was Shostakovich’s darkly emotional and autobiographical String Quartet No. 8. All three works received worthy readings. Brahms once referred […]

The Actors’ Gang has produced many highly acclaimed theatrical works since Tim Robbins (a multi-talented artist who won an Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role in the film Mystic River) founded the troupe in 1981. That rapturous response may stem from the sincerity with which the company approaches the plays they perform, according […]

William Shakespeare tells us through the title character in Macbeth, “Now, good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both!” Mangia Nashville, named “Nashville’s Best Weekly Food Event” by the Nashville Scene, is about to supply great food for good digestion to benefit Nashville Shakespeare Festival. Nick Pellegrino, owner-chef of Mangia Nashville, will create a delightful […]

The Present The most recent issue of American Theatre Magazine featured an excellent article about New Dramatists’ artistic director and “official gadfly of the institutional theatre,” Todd London, whose book Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play I wrote about on my Theatre Ideas blog when it first came out in 2009. The American Theatre article by Stephen Nunns prompted me to order […]

Denyce Graves knows how to work a room. On Friday night, the world-renowned mezzo soprano walked with patrician grace onstage at McAfee Concert Hall, bowed elegantly and then addressed the audience. Graves was introducing her first selection, “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Delilah. In this famed aria, which Graves described […]

Zeitgeist Gallery’s Indeterminacies new-music series will present one of its most adventurous shows yet on Sunday evening, when guitarist Denny Jiosa and composer Robert Bond perform via Skype with students in China. Bond came up with the idea after a recent conversation on Skype with his friend Fran Zinder, a former Nashville visual artist who […]

How did seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer paint with such accuracy that his works look more like exquisite photographs on canvas? And if he developed a device that enabled him to capture light and color with clarity not discernible by the naked eye, does that lessen his standing as a great artist and possibly make […]

The Belcourt Theatre Board of Directors has promoted managing director Stephanie Silverman to executive director, according to an announcement made today. In addition, the Board elected new officers for its 2012-2013 term. Donna Drehmann, president of customer experience consulting firm Listen, Learn, Live, will serve as board chairman; Van Pond, Jr., architect and principal of […]

Music City Theatre Company is at it again with another Tennessee premiere of a hot-out-of-New-York play. Earlier this year it was Venus in Fur – twice – and now Bradley Moore and colleagues are tackling Other Desert Cities beginning Thursday. Jon Robin Baitz’s play was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2012 […]